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That Uncertain Muse and Witness, Memory

Michael Cerveris, center left, and Judy Kuhn in “Fun Home,” adapted by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron from Alison Bechdel’s memoir, at the Public Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“Blow out your candles, Laura,” Tom says. But she doesn’t.

At the end of the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” the candles of Laura Wingfield, the housebound sister of Tom, the play’s narrator, remain lighted, disrupting a darkness that would otherwise be complete. Their pulsing brightness lingers, like a retinal afterglow, and it’s the final image you take away from John Tiffany’s production at the Booth Theater.

That’s memory that keeps burning, as elusive as it is inextinguishable. Not allowing Laura to blow out her candles (brought on earlier, when the electricity fails) goes against theatrical precedent and the explicit instructions in Williams’s script.

Yet, like much of Mr. Tiffany’s beautiful and unorthodox production, this continued illumination feels profoundly true to the spirit of a work about a man who wants to forget and can never forget the sister he left behind. Tom’s failure to stop remembering gives “Glass Menagerie” its shape, its tone, its very existence.

Something like Laura’s candles has been flickering from stages all over New York this winter. I can’t remember a season in which memory, as form and subject, has been so dominant in so many productions. In addition to “Menagerie” — of which Tom (played by Zachary Quinto) says baldly, “This play is memory” — Broadway has given us revivals of two works by Harold Pinter, “Betrayal” and “No Man’s Land,” which both present recollection as a shield and a weapon, a capricious tormentor and a most untrustworthy consoler.

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In Performance: Zachary Quinto

Zachary Quinto as Tom in a scene from the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Glass Menagerie,” on Broadway at the Booth Theater.

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, who portray old men with competitive and mutable versions of the past in “No Man’s Land,” alternate those roles in repertory (under Sean Mathias’s direction) at the Cort Theater with the bedraggled heroes of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Those would be Estragon and Vladimir, wandering tramps for whom past, present and future tenses sometimes blur into a single, indefinite grammar.

While Tom envisions a claustrophobic world dominated by his mother, Amanda, in “Menagerie,” a woman named Alison is summoning life with father, enchanted and injurious, in the musical “Fun Home,” off Broadway at the Public Theater, written by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron and based on a graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel.

And in Anne Washburn’s “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” seen this fall at Playwrights Horizons and one of the most original new American works of theater in years, a group of survivors of nuclear devastation bond together as a collective living memory. Their attempts to recreate a single episode of the television series “The Simpsons” — first as a shared campfire story and later as a full-blown musical — become a celebration of memory and theater as interdependent partners in the endurance of civilization.

Theater is an especially suitable vehicle for the contemplation and evocation of memory, since it exists fully only in the moment it is being performed. After that, it lives on only in our minds. If you want to pin down what Proust said about recapturing time or how the filmmaker Christopher Nolan warps time in his movies, you need only consult a book or a digital recording.

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Celia Keenan-Bolger as Laura in “The Glass Menagerie.”Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

With theater, though you can always check the script of a play you’ve seen, reading a specific line won’t give you the cadences and facial expression and posture of the performer who uttered it. Or the way the light struck that person’s face, or the shared raptness — or restlessness, discomfort or glee — of the audience at that moment.

As for recordings of live productions, the technology doesn’t exist that recreates the energy exchanged between actors and their observers. Theater remains a “you had to be there” experience. Those of us who have seen the same show, even on the same night, all have our own individual versions of it stored away. And every time we bring them out for examination or display, they’ve probably changed a little, which doesn’t mean their emotional hold on us is any less.

Comparing notes with a fellow theatergoer, even minutes after the performance ends, can be as much an exercise in disorientation as recalling a holiday dinner with other members of your family. “No, Granddaddy would never have said that,” one of you will insist to another, or “I’m sure that mother did not cry when she broke the wineglass.” A recurring motif in Pinter’s “Betrayal” has to do with just such a discrepancy, involving a child’s being thrown into the air.

Memory plays make specific art out of the ways we heighten and distort the view over our shoulders. The attention-hijacking parents in the current “Glass Menagerie” and “Fun Home” are dazzlingly embodied by Cherry Jones, as Williams’s Amanda, and Michael Cerveris, as Bruce Bechdel, in ways that feel both larger than life and ineffably true to it. Both performances reminded me of my father, or rather how I remember my father, a man of considerable charisma and volcanic moods.

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Ian McKellen, left, and Patrick Stewart in “No Man’s Land,” one of several current shows concerned with the comforts and vagaries of recollections.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

My father is no longer around to affirm or dispute that assessment. If he were, we might lock horns in the manner of Spooner and Hirst, the decaying poets played with full actorly wiles by Mr. McKellen and Mr. Stewart in “No Man’s Land.” These two use conversation to reinvent, on the spot, a past they may or may not have shared. Dialogue becomes a duel, as it always is in Pinter.

And, as in his “Old Times” and “Betrayal” (both first staged in the 1970s, and bookends to the mid-decade “No Man’s Land”), what’s at stake isn’t what happened, but who gets to say what happened. History, as we are often told, belongs to the victors.

Hirst (at least when he’s not in a drunken coma) and Spooner are consciously aware of this primary rule of power. In “Godot,” Estragon and Vladimir operate on a less obviously sophisticated, more instinctive level. Part of the joy of watching these actors in both productions is seeing how they embody these contrasts.

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In their rendering, Beckett’s tramps are as childlike as Pinter’s old men of letters are guileful. (This is fitting, since, as an artist, Beckett is the wise-child father of Pinter.) This means that unlike the eternally obfuscating Spooner and Hirst, Estragon and Vladimir openly express the bewilderment inspired by their powers of recollection, or lack thereof.

At the beginning of the second act of “Godot,” when the tramps reunite after a brief separation, they consider the single tree that adorns the landscape. Was it there yesterday? Did it look like that yesterday? Is this even the same place they were yesterday?

I first saw Mr. McKellen and Mr. Stewart perform that scene in London several years ago, and it was different then. Except that it wasn’t. Really. I remember it well.

A version of this article appears in print on January 8, 2014, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: That Uncertain Muse And Witness, Memory. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe